Sony Mobile, despite its lackluster presence here for the past few years, is gradually re-entering the US market. The Japanese company's latest flagship, the Xperia XZ, went up for pre-order a little over a week ago, and it's now available for purchase. Unfortunately, at $700, I don't see the XZ helping Sony's dwindling smartphone business much.

According to investor presentation slides obtained by Xperia Blog, Sony has told investors in Japan at a recent event that the company's mobile business will be further "defocused" in the United States, as well as in India, China, and Brazil.

Sony's Xperia X line of handsets, announced at MWC in February, have been met with critical apathy, if not outright disdain in some cases. Sony announced the X series would be launching in America back in May, and the handsets have not yet begun shipping. This makes the language in the slides almost surprising - Sony is essentially admitting that it will be walking back its US mobile business, what even exists of it, just as new devices launch.

Do you work in a big office building of several floors with hundreds of others employees and dozens of different divisions interspersed without any logic? Do you find trouble navigating that office when you have a meeting or lose time looking for the coworkers you need to collaborate with? Then Sony has the solution to your woes.

From Xperia Labs comes Smart Office, an app that requires "Sony mobile's indoor positioning" installation. What that hardware is or how your boss can get their hands on it, I couldn't tell, but the app's developers say you can get in touch if you're interested in installing it in your facilities.

Sony is currently riding high with the success of the PS4, but there's a dark spot in the Japanese company's just-announced quarterly earnings. Of course, I'm referring to Sony Mobile. The mobile division responsible for Xperia-branded phones and tablets saw its worst sales numbers in three years. This does not bode well for future Xperia products.

The FreeXperia team of contributors help maintain CyanogenMod support for Xperia devices, and they've done such a great job that Sony has decided to hire one of the group's developers. Alin Jerpelea was one of FreeXperia's founders in 2010, and he is now the newest member of Sony's Developer Program. Having already built up a reputation for his work bringing the freshest CyanogenMod ROMs to Sony devices, he will now help the company with its open source initiatives.

“I am very happy that Alin is joining us, as this is a great way for us to increase our activity on Android Open Source Project (AOSP) and other open source initiatives.

Sony's released another Xperia-exclusive app into the Play Store, and while this piece of software does extend what your phone's camera is capable of, it isn't quite the Zperia Z1's Timeshift Burst feature that the company posted to Google Play a few months back. This one's just for laughs. Voice Balloon Photo is a dedicated camera app, but rather than improving the quality of your shots, it adds character by capturing the voices around you and turning them into speech bubbles in real-time.

I can think of a few choice words coming from this man that the app didn't pick up on.

Owners of the budget-oriented Sony Xperia L are getting a nice surprise today as the company announced an update to Android 4.2 (build 15.3.A.0.26). The device launched with Android 4.1, and this update not only bumps it up to 4.2, it includes some improvements to Sony's apps and features.

There isn't a phone on the planet that doesn't have at least a few bugs upon its release, but one such bug being reported by some Xperia Z owners is a doozie. The story goes that users are happily using their shiny new phone when it dies and refuses to wake up. Sony has finally chimed in online, saying the issue has been identified and a bug fix will roll out as part of the next software update.

Some folks say a hard restart fixes the issue, having resurrected their handsets multiple times. Other phones seem to be completely inoperable after just a single occurrence.

Owners of Sony Mobile's "WhiteMagic" phone, the Xperia P, have been stuck on pre-4.0 software for some time now. This, needless to say, was no fun at all.

However, as can be seen in the above Facebook post from Sony Mobile India, the device will indeed be getting its proper serving of Ice Cream Sandwich sometime between August 19th and August 25th, just as expected.